Aus Hearing check-ups Nov 2009

Well, it seems miracles do happen...i know that to be true, but i wondered if they'd ever occur in Government departments! What, you may ask, is this wondrous moment, this glorious event?

We managed to get two (read: 2!) Australian Hearing appointments, one each for Jarrah & Kaelen, on the same day!

And not just the same day, but even adjacent times! How perfectly suitable...

And, the miracles didn't cease there!

These were standard 6-monthly check-ups, so it was the usual round of testing to check hearing levels & canal volumes and tympanometry and all those exciting things. Kaelen's results were stable as usual, which is great - no changes there. He wasn't too interested in the puppets this time, so we resorted to party lights to encourage him to respond - worked beautifully! :-)

I approach Jarrah's check-ups with a very open mind these days, content in the knowledge that i have no idea what results he's going to return. Took me a while, but i have learned not to predict the outcome - one disappointment too many makes it not worthwhile anymore. Because he's now over 3, he can have his check-up with just one audiologist (instead of 2), and, being the independent and trusting little bloke that he is, happily toddled off with the audiologist without me so that i could stay with Kaelen to complete his appointment!

We joined Jarrah quite some time later, and herein lies the next miracle - his results were basically the same as his June check-up, which were the best results to-date!

Two consecutive tests with the same results! For Jarrah, that's a miracle!!

Perhaps this is the beginning of his hearing levels settling down; perhaps it's just a lull; perhaps it's a sign of his middle ear troubles disappearing - who knows, all i really care is that they didn't have to make his hearing aids any louder!

So, back again in 6 months time...it's quietened down quite a lot lately; not so many ENT appt's now that the grommets are working, and staying in and clear; no extra appt's for Kaelen cos he has stable levels and no middle ear issues. Something close to normal life!

Next appt: Wed 5th May Aus Hearing check-ups (yes both, and consecutive - again! But then, at 6 months out that much easier to do...)

Appreciate the little things...

It's raining at my house. Jarrah had recently got up from having a nap, and i'd been cooking dinner, so i hadn't yet put his hearing aids in. I pointed out to him that it was raining, so he rushed over to the door to look at the rain. Lately, he's been saying to me, "Can you hear the plane?" when there's been a plane flying overhead, which made me realise that he probably couldn't hear the rain without his ears in...

*Sigh*, get the goop, put them in...then i could ask him, "Can you hear the rain?" "Yes," he said, "hear the rain!"

Praise God for technology that can help my deaf son hear the pitter-patter of rain on the roof...

BTW, we cancelled all our September appointments as Jarrah was quite unwell - turned out he contracted Roseola, otherwise known as Baby Measles, so he had his latest Study assessment just last week, and his regular Australian Hearing checkup was rescheduled for...November 18. Yes, 8-9 weeks wait. Nevermind, at least J&K are on the same day this time!

Am I allowed to sing the praises of early intervention? Too bad, cos i'm about to...

I cannot begin to describe what I'm feeling right now. Is this what parents with hearing children experience? I don't know, but elation is probably a word that comes close.

Kaelen is currently in his room "reading" books. I just went to have a look at what he was reading, and he turned a page, pointed to a picture of a duck and said, "duck!"

(Imagine mouth hanging open, synapses dizzy with joy)

At 13 months old!

Maybe that's normal, but when J was 13 months old, all he could say was "aahhhh", and in hindsight he was completely deaf at this point. Kaelen is now saying/signing "please" when he wants something, has jsut told me there's a duck in his book, and the other night was trying to copy "ssssss" for the sound a snake makes (comes out "pfff", but not a bad try!). For a hearing impaired child, i think that's pretty darn good.

Why the difference?

Early intervention.

Jarrah's age when hearing aids first fitted: 18 months, following 4-6 months of total deafness due to fluid in the middle ear. Kaelen's age when hearing aids first fitted: 3 months, with constant monitoring and fortunately no fluid. My thoughts: the earlier you can get hearing aids into a hearing impaired child, and monitor their middle ear pathology, the better!

Anyway, nothing to do with appointments or anything, but jsut a quick note of joy that Kaelen's speech & language seems to be developing quite well thankyou very much!!

Next appt: J's Aus Hearing checkup, Wed 9th Sept

False Alarm...

OK, so we don' have to go back to the Mater Cochlear Implant Team after all...

Since my phone call and emailed copy of J's latest test results last week weren't quite enough, i received a phone message from the Mater Implant Team on Monday, saying they'd received J's results from our Aus Hearing audiologist, and maybe we didn't need to come in after all...

Nope, i'm just a Mum - i know nothing.

I returned the call and talked to the audiologist who would have seen Jarrah...who was also of the opinion that these latest results show that Jarrah is nowhere close to being an implant candidate, and that it probably really wasn't necessary for us to attend the appointment. Hooray! Someone sees sense at last! I didn't know our audiologist was going to email the Team, but i'm sure glad they did!

Ohwell, that makes next week slightly quieter...lots of family gatherings over the weekend & Monday PM (including visitors from overseas - USA as well as Tasmania! =D ), then ENT checkup for both boys on Kaelen's birthday, Wed 1st :-)

Another unexpected letter...

Hehe, just when you think things are going to settle down for a while...

If you've read the previous post to this, you'll know that Jarrah returned an amazing audiogram at last week's Australian Hearing checkup. I must confess that i thought that things would begin to settle a bit now, that we could relax a little, and that we'd just continue on our current course.

The Mater sure know how to mess with yr head! :-) On Monday we received a letter from the Mater Cochlear Implant Team, requesting that we attend an appointment on Monday 29th June at 9am.

What?!?

I thought we were out of the Implant land now! Anyway, I emailed our Australian Hearing audiologist who suggested i call the Mater to see if we really needed to attend the appointment. I rang them, and impressed upon them the fact that we'd just had an Aus Hearing checkup and that J returned excellent results, but no, they do *different* tests, and this is really a follow-on from our initial consultation (which was last year!), and yes we really must attend...oh, and could they have a copy of his latest audiogram please.

Well, hopefully this will be the last time we will have to attend the Mater Cochlear Implant clinic...

Jarrah - that boy is full of surprises!

Thurs 11th June - Jarrah's Australian Hearing checkup

This was due to be just a regular 6-monthly checkup...but of course, we can never tell what Jarrah's going to do! I was unable to take Jarrah to this appointment due to my music teaching, so Keith got to have his first visit to Australian Hearing.

Because Jarrah was nearly 3, they used Play Audiometry instead of the VROA (Puppet test). Play Audiometry is very similar to what we do at Speech every week with the Ling Sounds - Jarrah has to actively listen, then performs an action or repeats the sound when he hears something - so he was already quite familiar with the task. He'd only had 30mins sleep at Kindy, so I must confess i was a bit apprehensive about his state of mind...

Well, Keith came home with some interesting news...Jarrah's levels appear to have improved!! How is this possible? I don't know, but i've got an audiogram to prove it! :-)

Lower and middle frequencies appear to remain unchanged, but the higher frequencies (2kHz & 4kHz) appear to have improved by up to 20db! Instead of the higher frequencies tapering off towards the severe/profound end of the scale (80-100db), they pull back up towards normal hearing thresholds (40-50db)...very odd, considering 12 months ago we were still wondering if Jarrah was a cochlear implant candidate!

Jarrah's language has kicked up a new level recently. Since receiving his new Giraffe hearing aids (Phonak Naida V's), we've noticed that all his words have been getting clearer, and in the last 2-3 weeks there's been an added level of complexity that hasn't been there before. He's started using strings of words together, 2 & 3 or more at a time; he's started initiating conversation, stating something that happened or that he feels; he's using 'yes' & 'no' appropriately (finally!!); he's begun using quantifiers - 'lots of', 'very very', etc. It's hard to know how much of this is attributable to the Naida's and how much is developmental, but it's wonderful to hear him gaining more understanding about his world and life.

Jarrah turned 3 today, and by dinnertime tonight he really knew it was his birthday - i didn't count how many times he sang Happy Birthday during dinner! :-) We had treat breakfast (McDonald's), went to swimming lessons (where Jarrah was put up to a new class!), then came home and prepared for a small party. We just had grandparents and J's best friend and his family over for morning tea, but it was nice. This is really the first year that J has understood the idea of it being his birthday, so it was fun to see him again discovering something new.

Let's see if i can upload the latest audiogram for your viewing pleasure! :-)

It's happening! He's beginning to "speak"!

I guess this must be kinda normal for most parents, but i have to confess to being rather excited today. Kaelen has begun to make some sounds that really have meaning and intent behind them, mostly in the last week or two - "ow" or "ag" for 'meow' when looking at a cat, "aaaah-aaaah" with dropping pitch for 'round and round' when looking at a fan, "bvvv!" for 'boo!' when playing peek-a-boo, "brrr" with raspberry for 'brrrooom, brrrooom!' when playing with a car - and today he just blew the top off my expectations and "said" 2 new "words" during his speech lesson! For the first time, he copied "woof woof" (including body movement!), and "Go!" as we were rolling a ball between us.

Later in the day, while J was sleeping, K & I played with a spiral car ramp we have - you set up 2 cars in bays at the top, then press a lever to tip them up and make them go down the spiral ramp. We've been doing "1, 2, 3, Go!" with that as a good listening exercise, cos he can press the lever easily. When we played with it today, after i said "1, 2, 3, Go!" Kaelen would make his own little "Go!" sound, and then press the lever! I'm just a bit amazed at how much understanding, purpose and intent there is behind these little sounds!

When i thought about it before speech this morning, as i was preparing to tell our teacher how wonderfully he'd been doing during the week, it occurred to me that by this age (11 months), Jarrah was profoundly deaf due to compounding colds and therefore fluid in his middle ears; think of being underwater permanently, except the water's more like glue. It would be another 5 months before Jarrah would hear anything with any sort of clarity (after insertion of grommets at 16 months), another month before he would make his first sound with intent/meaning, and yet another month before he got his first hearing aids (at 18 months old). Considering Kaelen got his first hearing aids at just 3 months old, it just goes to show the value and effectiveness of that early intervention!!

It does feel a little odd, having a baby who's not yet 12 months old beginning to "say" things, when our only experience has been having been one who doesn't say anything for another nearly 6 months. It's a bit hard to know what "normal" is at the moment...although if it's what we're experiencing now, we are most grateful!

Well, it's nearly the middle of the year, which means a few things: (1) Birthdays (Jarrah turns 3 on June 13, Kaelen turns 1 on July 1), and (2) Appointments! We have regular checkups with ENT & chiro & a few others, and at the moment they're all at approximately 6 month intervals...so July is checkup month! We'll have ENT for both boys, probably Paediatrician for Kaelen, 12 month vaccinations for Kaelen, and possibly chiropractic checks for both too. Think i'll just block out the first week of July on the calendar and call it Appointment Week! Will keep you all posted on any interesting developments...

Kaelen - Aus Hearing checkup May 2009

Thurs 7th May 2009 - today was Kaelen's repeat Aus Hearing checkup, nearly 2 months after the original appointment! He had a checkup scheduled for 11th March, but testing that day was pretty inconclusive - he didn't respond as well to the testing as we'd hoped, and he was only just old enough for VROA's (Puppet test) anyway, so we had to reschedule. Welcome to government departments, the next available appointment was today, 7th May, nearly 2 months later!

Kaelen was amazing today. He's been shuffling his morning sleep a bit later recently, closer to or a bit after 10am, and this morning's appointment was 9:15am. I was hoping he might sleep in a bit this morning and therefore be in good condition and able to be awake and happy at least til 10am. When i heard him awake at 6:30am, i didn't know what was going to happen - but there was nothing i could do about it then.

We began testing soon after 9:15am; did the Left ear...did the Right ear...did Bone Conduction - and by then it was 10:15am! Kaelen was still happy and responding well, so we actually got a full set of results which, according to the senior audiologist, would normally take 2 sessions to get from a 10-month-old baby. By the time the hearing aids were adjusted and re-fitted, it was after 10:30, and Kaelen still hadn't dissolved yet. Mind you, i put him down to sleep right away, and he was out to it by 10:45am :-)

So - yes, there's still a hearing loss, but the good news is that nothing appears to have changed since his very first tests at the Mater in 2008! Hooray!!! Stable hearing levels!!

We also took the time to put Jarrah's & Kaelen's audiograms side-by-side for a comparison, just for curiosity's sake really. Interestingly, they are about the same shape, but Jarrah's loss is just slightly worse than Kaelen's. Their right ears both have a fairly flat loss, between 50-70db across the 5 tested frequencies (250Hz, 500Hz, 1kHz, 2kHz, 4kHz); their left ears have a sloping loss, starting between 50-70db across the lower 3 frequencies and sloping up to 80-90db across the higher 2 frequencies. We haven't done any genetic testing as yet, but now seeing these audiograms side-by-side, i wouldn't be at all surprised if something shows up when the time comes...

Oh, and Kaelen's latest favourite game is Peek-a-boo...when he's particularly enjoying it, he says "Bvvv!"...meaning "Boo", of course, but it's just great that he's hearing and beginning to use some simple words/sounds. May it continue!

We have consonants!!

In the last few days, Kaelen has begun to make some consonant sounds, rather than all vowels! This is cause for great celebration, cos it's a sign that his speech is (a) developing, (b) developing normally, and (c) developing age-appropriately.

Last Sunday (Apr 5th), he discovered that rubbing his bottle in his mouth while saying "Aaah" made a pretty cool sound. He pretty soon found that the same effect could be achieved using his fist, or my shoulder, whichever was most convenient at the time. On Sunday night, he began to say "Mmmm", which was very encouraging. On Monday we got "Ummm" and "Umaa", and then on Thursday we got both "aba" and "ama", plus a few repetitions. This morning, Easter Sunday morning, we're getting lots of "abababa", which sometimes also sounds like "amamama", and we're hoping that from here on Kaelen's speech & language development will continue to progress 'normally'.

Kaelen was 9 months old on the 1st of April, so to have then beginnings of consonants at this age is well within 'normal' developmental ranges. Hooray!!!

Jarrah has Giraffes!

Mon 6th April 2009

Jarrah has been recruited to a longitudinal study being done by the National Acoustic Laboratory, which is the research arm of Australian Hearing. The study is called LOCHI, or Learning Outcomes of Children with Hearing Impairments, and aims to study exactly that.

Various things seem to happen as part of that study, and i can never quite tell what's coming next. The most recent thing to happen is the trial of a new hearing aid, and Jarrah has been chosen as part of the test group to receive these new hearing aids. They have amazing white-man-magic features, and it's going to be really interesting to see how he goes with them, but the most exciting thing is that we decided to depart from the traditional beige...and go for giraffe prints!

J knows he has giraffes on his ears, but i'm not sure that he's quite as excited about them as i am :-) They're bronze with white patterns, and i think they're really cute! At least i won't have to write the boys' initials on their units anymore... :-)

Kaelen's VROA (Puppet test) - 1st attempt

Wed 11th March 2009

This was Kaelen's next check-up at Australian Hearing. Because he's now 8 months old, it was decided that he might be ready for a VROA (Puppet test) so we gave it a go.

He got the idea of the game (when you hear a certain sound, turn and see a puppet dance as a visual reward), but was inconsistent in his responses once we got to below about 70db. We were pretty sure he could actually hear the sounds, just for some reason didn't think he had to turn around...

So, we have to re-schedule. For May 7th. Welcome to government departments. At least he'll be a couple of months older by then, and hopefully get the idea better...

Silence...of another kind!

Wow, it's been a while since i've written anything - mostly cos we haven't actually had an appointment for quite some time! A bit of an achievement for us...

Anyway, I thought i'd just write a few things that have been happening lately...

I had an interesting discussion with our Aus Hearing audiologist in January about Jarrah, who i had noticed was hearing ok but still not alway listening well, and certainly unable to answer any sort of questions. I noticed it particularly back in December when we went to visit the Kindy Jarrah is now going to - they offered him milk or water and he just looked at them as if they had spoken to him in Chinese. I observed him more closely over the following weeks, and noticed that requests requiring an action were ok, but anything requiring a verbal answer was not. It seemed he didn't understand that there was such a thing. Anyway, while discussing something quite different with the audiologist, i had a bit of a revelation about why there might be this problem with questions. It seems that Jarrah has a very good auditory memory, so has been learning words & phrases as distinct items, but not necessarily understanding that all words have meaning, and absorbing the meaning from sentences - he tends to latch onto one word that he knows and makes an assumption about how that word was used, rather than listening to the rest of the sentence and processing that.

I had wondered if his comprehension was really as good as i should have expected it to be by this stage (1 full year of hearing aids & speech lessons), and i was finding myself often frustrated by his apparent total lack of understanding of what seemed quite basic language. When we returned to speech lessons in Feb i asked our teacher about all this, wondering how i was sposed to teach J to process language, not just learn distinct sounds, and she decided that questions and turn-taking with language was something we should work on. By now J had taken to copying back the question instead of ignoring it altogether, so at least he was hearing it, but there was still no understanding (a) of what the question meant, and (b) that he was required to give a response. We've ended up doing lots of role-playing and lots of pointing at the person whose turn it is to speak, and he's beginning to get the idea. Now I at least get a "no thankyou" when i ask if he needs to go to the potty! :-)

Yes, in the middle of all this I decided it was time to go nuts with the potty. We'd been sitting J on it sometimes regularly (sometimes irregularly!) for months, and a couple of times he'd even woken in the middle of the night to use it! I figured that meant he was really able to train at least in the day time...and when i discovered that we had a clear calendar for a week or so, i thought we'd have a shot and see what happened. So, here we are 2 weeks later in undies :-) and today we had our first accident-free day; we managed to finish the day in the same pair of undies we started in - yay Jarrah!

Kindy began in January - i really felt it would be good for Jarrah to begin to learn to function in a fully hearing environment, without a lot of the help that he gets at home, and to learn to socialise more with kidlets his age, so i enrolled him in a local Kindy just one day a week. At first i wasn't sure how he would go in terms of language, i thought everyone might struggle (teachers included!) but he seems to have done fine...well, more than fine really, his language has come ahead in leaps and bounds, many of the songs he sings are now much clearer and actually have the right number of words in each phrase :-) Each Friday when he comes home he seems to use words more than just noise, which is wonderful - lots of little speaking people obviously helps! Hopefully this will continue, but at this point Kindy was the best thing we've done this year!

Kaelen is now comfortably sitting up and responding really well to sounds, both speech & general noises. At the moment we're trying to encourage him to attempt to copy some animal noises (moo, baa, etc.), mostly looking for different vowel sounds, and you know i reckon he's trying to say moo. It sounds like aahhhh, but it's the same aahhh each time, and has a very similar rise and fall to my moo...he did it a few times today, see if he'll do it again tomorrow...

My son's first word: moo :-)

Next appt: Wed 11th March, Aus Hearing checkup for Kaelen; first VROA (puppet test)

January appointments - ENT & chiro

Sorry, forgot to blog about these ones, they were reasonably inconsequential...

Tuesday 6th January - ENT checkup for Kaelen. Kaelen first saw our ENT when he was about 10wks old, and was far too tiny at that point for the ENT to see anything much in his ears, so we were advised to come back when he was about 6 months old. Since that happened on New Years Day, we duly went back and apparently the view was much easier, and there's no sign of any fluid behind his eardrums at all! This is very good, and it will now be interesting to see the results of Kaelen's first VROA (puppet test), due to be done in early March.

ENT had a look in Jarrah's ears too, while we were there, and they appear to be clear atm as well. They have been discharging in an alternating fashion over Christmas, but that appeared to be co-incidental with the arrival of certain 2-yr-old molars. Since the teeth have arrived, the ears appear to have righted themselves. We did purchase a small otoscope so we could keep an eye on things more closely ourselves, but hopefully we're over the worst of it, and if we can keep Kaelen well this winter, we may be able to avoid the middle-ear issues we've had with Jarrah. I believe his middle ear troubles really began in about May 2007 when he got a bad cold which lasted about 8wks...that was pretty much the beginning of the end!

We had a fun trip in and out of town on the train - it's the first time i've not had Jarrah in the stroller, so it was going to be interesting to see how well he coped with all the walking. We stopped at our local park for a quick play on the way to the train station (so Kaelen could go to sleep) and then walked the rest of the way. Unfortunately J fell during that walk, and something made walking uncomfortable for him, so he didn't walk much at all that day, he mostly perched on the front of the pram! He was very good and didn't wiggle about or cause any difficulty, and walked well when i needed him to. We boarded the train (which was unexpectedly packed!) and he found himself a seat right away, just near the door where we always sit atm. No help from me, he knew what to do...

Wednesday 7th Jan - Chiropractic check-ups for both boys. Dr checked them all over and said they're doing great. Just a few small adjustments, but generally fine. The advice is to go back every 3 or 4 months, but i must confess that Sandgate is quite a drive with 2 small kids, so we're just doing twice a year atm, especially since they seem to be doing fine and not needing major adjustments each time.

Next appt: Mon 19th Jan, K Paediatrician